There are three things you can configure in ME: Path aliases for your site that indicate you've already seen the article and don't want to accept it, default outbound feed patterns, and limitations on what distributions you want to accept.
The default outbound feed patterns do belong in newsfeeds, since they directly affect how all of the other patterns are interpreted. But they're more like the variables that newsfeed supports, except that all feeds add that variable at the start by default. I wonder if we should just declare some particular variable (FEED_PREFIX or something) special and let you set it to prepend that set of patterns to every feed.
The other two (Path aliases and what distributions to accept) really have nothing to do with the purpose of newsfeeds. We could just move both into incoming.conf, so that they can be set separately for different incoming feeds, which would be useful for some purposes.
A proposal from Russ Allbery:
There are three things you can configure in
ME:Path aliases for your site that indicate you've already seen the article and don't want to accept it, default outbound feed patterns, and limitations on what distributions you want to accept.The default outbound feed patterns do belong in newsfeeds, since they directly affect how all of the other patterns are interpreted. But they're more like the variables that newsfeed supports, except that all feeds add that variable at the start by default. I wonder if we should just declare some particular variable (
FEED_PREFIXor something) special and let you set it to prepend that set of patterns to every feed.The other two (Path aliases and what distributions to accept) really have nothing to do with the purpose of newsfeeds. We could just move both into incoming.conf, so that they can be set separately for different incoming feeds, which would be useful for some purposes.